About this project

The City of Kings: A Cooperative Adventure for 1 - 4 Heroes

£283,371

pledged of £28,500 goal

3,132

backers

The City of Kings is a fully cooperative fantasy adventure board game. You and up to 3 friends play the roles of the surviving leaders and must defeat the armies of Vesh over a series of 7 stories. Each story offers a unique challenge and has optional objectives depending on how long you want to play.

The game features full character customisation, worker management, board exploration, roleplaying style quests and strategic combat designed for replayability. Experience dice free combat and battle against more than 10,000,000 uniquely generated creatures on a map that has 1,000's of possible layouts, using characters you create by choosing from
over 100 different options.

There are 6 heroes to choose from, each featuring 12 unique skills and 90 customisable stat points allowing you to specialise in attacking, healing, tanking, area control and worker management.

The City of Kings can be played in 2 ways, by choosing
either a story or a scenario.

Stories

There are 7 stories
to play, each story has its own objectives and continues a narrative
introducing you to the world and characters. Stories are the heart of The City
of Kings and will provide you with a challenging, immersive experience.

Scenarios

Scenarios are quick ways to play the game offering smaller
challenges of varying difficulty. They focus on different aspects such as combat
or worker management and provide endless ways to play, and you can even create your own!

Let’s go

Once you have chosen a story or scenario, each player will
need to choose a hero to play. Each hero can be customised by levelling up,
allowing you to create your own role.

Perhaps you want to be a long-range attacker or a fast moving,
short range healer. If you’d prefer to focus on absorbing damage (tanking) or
managing workers, then you can do that too! There are 90 customisable stat points and 12
skills per hero, so you never have to play the same way twice.

The City of Kings is played in rounds, during each round you
will check if you have completed your objective, update the time tracker and
then each player will perform their turn.

Players will move across the board turning over tiles, discovering
resources, side quests, hazards, building sites, traders, creatures and more.

Each player will control
multiple characters, their hero and their own workers, who can be used to
gather resources, build structures, explore and place traps.

When you encounter creatures they will be generated from a
simple set of rules creating a challenging creature for you to defeat. There
are over 10,000,000 possible creatures
to fight and each will require you to come up with a strategy to defeat it.

Creatures are persistent, staying on the board until they
are defeated. There are no dice*, if
your attack stat is 5, you will do 5 damage. You will need to work together,
using your environment to absorb the creatures attacks, keep each other alive and
to find a way to overcome the creatures' powerful abilities.

* For players who like
to roll dice, there is an optional character stat which you can level up,
allowing you to roll dice to modify your attack and heal actions.

The Blood-Letter's chase Vyliria and Earthshaker around the board setting fire to the environment. Our heroes try to survive whilst their workers build up the Shrine, giving them the additional strength they need to defeat the creature.

The City of Kings offers endless puzzles requiring true
cooperation, full character customisation, roleplaying quests, resource
management and an immersive experience that we hope you will love.

The City of Kings is a fully cooperative game with no hidden information and supports solo play through a single player controlling 2 heroes.
As such, the game plays the same as it would for 2, 3 and 4 players and you will get the full experience.

We have spent the last 2 years building a world for The City of Kings, designing characters, writing stories and detailing events spanning 13,755 years. We wanted to go further than a theme and design a world which you can immerse yourself in for years to come.

As you play through the game you will experience the Cloud Keep War and learn about the key characters who came together for one last fight, as they tried to stop Vesh from claiming the entire world.

You will encounter survivors in need of assistance and they will offer you side quests further describing the world you are in.

Thanks to unlocked stretch goals we can now add even more lore to the game by including back stories for each of the characters and all of the enemy factions.

Over time we plan to release more stories, written materials, and much more as we continue to share this world with you.

"I can't stress enough just how great it feels to play a game in which players become a close team through trying to beat the scenarios Frank has painstakingly worked on without enforcing co-operation... it's something else." - Jamie

"It reminds me of Mage Knight and Descent" - Nick

"it’s one of the funnest games I’ve played. Especially as a video game player it feels like World of Warcraft as a board game. Heaps of praise for it overall. It’s amazing how polished it is." - Ryan

We asked our playtesters what their favourite parts of The City of Kings were and put together a Top Ten Features list based on their feedback.

You can customise your pledge by clicking the 'manage pledge' option at the top right of the campaign page (it's green) and then manually edit your pledge amount, increasing it by the amount your customisations cost.

All customisations will be available after the campaign has ended but at higher costs and will incur extra shipping. You can save up to 50% on customisations by getting them during the campaign.

We have spent months planning our fulfilment process,
arranging bulk shipping to warehouses around the world including the United States, Canada, Australia and Europe. All with the goal of offering you the cheapest and most efficient shipping possible. But please keep in mind, this is a big game with over 1,000 components and is estimated to weigh between 5 and 6 kg (11 - 13lbs) so it is not cheap to ship, yet we are confident the level of replayability in the box will give you endless hours of gaming and offers great value for money.

Backers may add multiple copies of the game to their pledge
but must include the additional shipping fee for each additional copy, as
listed above.

Frank West is the designer of The City of Kings, he is also
the worldbuilder, art director and graphic designer.

Miguel Mitchell Da Silva is the amazing artist who spent the
last 18 months creating all of the beautiful pieces of art you will see whilst
adventuring in The City of Kings.

Sara Jorge is responsible for making Frank’s dream became a
reality by helping with prototypes, playtesting, design concepts and by believing in him every single
day.

Ian O'Reilly is our
primary writer assisting Frank with writing the stories and quests you’ll find
on our website and in the game.

Frank first started posting about designing The City of Kings on Board Game Geek back in 2015, you can read the work in progress posts here.

Risks and challenges

This is a large, ambitious project, but I am on Kickstarter today because I believe The City of Kings is ready and that I can live up to all the promises I am making on this page to deliver a great game.

Whilst this is my first Kickstarter, I have backed over 150 other projects, spent months studying and preparing for manufacturing, shipping and fulfilment and have worked on many high pressure projects in the last 10 years.

Design

The game has been designed and tested by countless people spending hundreds of hours testing the game. There are still a few scenarios to finish off and the stories may be enhanced if we hit our stretch goals but I have allowed time for this in our plan and have no doubts the game will be finished on time.

Artwork

All of the artwork is done for the core game, we have a few icons and bits of graphic design to finish off prior to print but otherwise we are good to go. We have allowed time in our plan for any artwork needed for stretch goals to be produced without impacting the delivery dates.

Manufacturing

We have been working with manufacturers and getting quotes for nearly a year, we are confident we can deliver a high quality game for the prices stated and will be looking at blank samples and pre-production prints before starting mass production.

Our prototype has had much praise for the quality of the components and we are convinced we will get an even better response with our end product.

Shipping

We have arranged shipping, importing and fulfilment around the world working with multiple companies who have been tried and tested by countless Kickstarters. There are always unknowns but I am confident we are as prepared as any Kickstarter can be.

Final words

Being this is my first campaign, I want to assure you I have picked over every detail, from rigorous playtesting of the game to having a full understanding of shipping logistics. Everything that can be done to make this successful and deliver on time has been done.

This is my passion, and I hope, the first steps to my future. I will do everything humanly possible to get this delivered on time.

Kickstarter is not a store.

Pledge £599 or more
About $750

Game Designer

Approx conversions:
$755 USD | €695 EUR | $989 AUS | $1010 CAN

Frank will work with you over Skype to create your own scenario which will be included in every game. He will teach you the mechanics of the game and explain how the game engine works to help you design your own game within the game.

You will be listed as co-designer for the scenario and have your name on the card.

You will get to choose the difficulty, objective and layout for the scenario as well as naming it and creating a short description.

Frank will help to balance the scenario and put it through playtests before it is printed.